ADT at Gartner Integration forum

At Gartner Summit: Tibco unveils new BAM tool
Tibco Software Inc. unveiled a new Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) offering for both IT managers and business analysts at the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit this week. Combining open source and open standards, Tibco OpsFactor was written in Java with 'XML at the core,' said Scott Fingerhut, general manager of business optimization products at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based integration software vendor. (Read more Gartner conference coverage below.)


At Gartner Summit: Software AG debuts XML integration product
Software AG is looking to move deeper into the legacy integration space with its XML Business Integration Portfolio, which the company debuted at the opening of the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit in Los Angeles. Seeking to leverage its high-volume transaction processing lineage and its more recent expertise in XML database development, Software AG’s Portfolio product is designed to help companies integrate legacy systems into Web services applications. Read more

At Gartner Summit: Jacada joins the Navy
Providing a case study in the use of XML Web services for internal integration, Jacada Ltd. unveiled a new tool for 'fusing' applications during the Gartner Application Integration and Web Service Summit held this week in Los Angeles. The U.S. Navy is using the new Jacada Fusion product to integrate procurement systems, including legacy systems where the Navy does not have the source code, into a single end-user application. Written in Java and implementing XML Web services standards, the new Fusion product represents a trend Gartner analysts are seeing. Read more

Related ADT coverage of Gartner conferences

Gates sees more modeling, less coding
Microsoft head Bill Gates, speaking at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004, emphasized the role of visual modeling as the foundation for future software engineering advances. Asked about innovations Microsoft sees coming in the next 10 years, Gates said the most significant will be visual modeling tools that will reduce software coding “by a factor of five.”

Analyst sees SOBA emerging as next trend in Web services
In an industry with no shortage of acronyms, Gartner is touting a new one, SOBA, or Service-Oriented Business Applications. Leading a session at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004, research director Charles Abrams told attendees that while the term was coined in the past two months, Gartner is predicting that SOBA will be a major technology trend in IT by 2007.

Gartner on RFID
The sensor network, already emerging from applications of RFID chips, will transform computing and life as we know it by 2014, predicts Gartner fellow Tom Austin. Holding up a vial containing tiny RFID chips, Austin told attendees at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004 in San Diego that the chips will impact every industry -- going far beyond their current role in Wal-Mart's supply-chain management experiments.

Another vote to endorse offshoring
IT management needs to embrace offshore outsourcing, despite the "genuine threat" of job losses, because the trend is not going to go away, asserted Michael Fleisher, chairman and CEO of Gartner. In his welcoming address to attendees at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2004 in San Diego, he argued that two popular responses, protectionism and blaming others, including the people of India and China, are doomed to failure. ''We must act from knowledge, not fear,'' Fleisher told an audience made up largely of IT managers in a packed ballroom in the San Diego convention center. At the same time, he conveyed Gartner's view that many of the IT jobs currently being outsourced will ''disappear in the next few years''